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Honestly, It's Probably the Phones

• jhoechtl 4y ago
  Honestly, it's probably the ecosystem which came with the ecosystems enabled by smart devices. We have phones like 100 years now? A phone is not the problem here.
  • cnity 4y ago
    "Phone" these days refers to smartphones. The article is obviously not talking about Alexander Graham Bell.
  • gotofritz 4y ago
    There has ALWAYS gotta be a pedant, isn't there... The article is obviously about smartphones and social media
    • usrusr 4y ago
      An it's about the phones even in the most pedantic way, because it's about how the phones have changed.
    • jhoechtl 4y ago
      Sure it's obvious. But why not name the baby accordingly?
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  A few days ago I saw two dudes who sat at a restaurant table and were talking to each other instead of staring at their phones like normal people do. What weirdos, I thought at first. But maybe there's a better explanation, maybe their phones were broken.
• thisiswrongggg 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • gotofritz 4y ago
    Unnecessarily pedantic, yes. "Smartphones" are only "smart" compared to what came before. Which to the youth is irrelevant, because before their day. To them a phone and a smartphone are the same thing. All your comment does is to let everyone know you are old enough to remember phones which weren't smart. Not sure what it adds to the conversation
• thriftwy 4y ago
  There are the two famous Russian Questions: "What is to be done?"[1] "Who is to blame?" As you have guessed correctly, the latter does not give you anything meaningful. If you take a phone off a depressed teenager, you get a suicidal teenager. What are you going to do about that? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F_(novel)
  • Majestic121 4y ago
    " If you take a phone off a depressed teenager, you get a suicidal teenager. " Do you ? You're giving this as an obvious fact, however it really is not. Maybe it's true, but it goes against what happens for young adults, or against : "This paper investigates the extent to which social media are harmful for teenagers, leveraging rich administrative data from the Canadian province of British Columbia and quasi-experimental variation related to the introduction of wireless internet there. I show neighbourhoods covered by highspeed wireless internet have significantly higher social media use, based on Google search volume data…I link spatial data on broadband coverage to 20 years of student records that provide detailed information about individual student health. Using this novel data linkage, I estimate a triple-difference model comparing teen girls to teen boys in terms of school-reported mental health diagnoses, before and after visual social media emerged, and across neighbourhoods with and without access to high-speed wireless internet. Estimates indicate high-speed wireless internet significantly increased teen girls’ severe mental health conditions – by 90% – relative to teen boys’ over the period when visual social media became dominant in teenage internet use. I find similar effects across all subgroups. When applying the same strategy, I find null impacts for placebo health conditions – ones for which there is no clear channel for social media to operate."
    • thriftwy 4y ago
      A teenager is crippled without a smartphone. They can't participate in any social life or meet people because they use phones exclusively to arrange everything. If it's a school prodigy they will find a way, but a random student will become a pariah.
  • 4y ago
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  > And third, in-person interaction is a network effect. If 20% of people would rather be on their phones, that reduces everyone else’s options for in-person hangouts by 20%. That should only be a problem if you can only hang out with a fixed group. If you live in a city of five million people, it shouldn't make much of a difference if one million of them would rather be on their phones then hang out in person. That's still four million people to hang out with. The only question is how to find those people. Meetups are one way.
  • lapcat 4y ago
    1) We're talking about teenagers, many or most of whom don't even have cars. 2) There's only one city in the United States with a population of at least 5 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
    • djkivi 4y ago
      Re (2), that's technically true, but the New York, LA, and other metro areas have far more than 5 million people.
      • lapcat 4y ago
        That's technically true, but... so what? As I noted, teens might not have access to transportation, so enlarging the geographical area doesn't necessarily help. And it doesn't help teens who don't live in those big metro areas. Not to mention, you can't just hang out with people who you don't know.
• sussexby 4y ago
  Humanity needs constraint. Beautiful art is created with constraint - here's a statue I carved purely out of one of the most difficult materials, marble. The most significant speeches of our time are delivered once, not on repeat. Even, on topic with the post, in my opinion Twitter's early attractiveness was the challenge of posting on a subject within the character limit constraint. Our default state as a species is to find ways to survive. Constraint flexes our brains to develop innovative ways to reach a goal. Information about other people is a significant asset in survival because we're built to learn things from others and to use that knowledge to further out survival. Simply standing in my house and saying "oh wow" will make my kids run to me to ask what it is. The current information age is tapping on all the systems we've evolved to survive in terms of information gathering, it's just that knowing that someone is eating a delicious meal in the city is not critical to survival - but once you know the information you can't unknow it leading to information overload. We're coaxed into feeling like we should care and we should know but it's a huge tax on the brain to deal with the complexity of the world. "Could I interest you in everything all of the time." - Bo Burnham
  • licebmi__at__ 4y ago
    I might agree with you with everything except twitter. I feel strongly that twitter has been disastrous to a nuanced public discourse. The format is just shit for everything that is not a catchy slogan or an oversimplification.
    • bluescrn 4y ago
      While Twitter brings out the anger and abuse, I think Reddit is more insidious, with heavy-handed moderation by a tiny number of all-powerful activist-moderators, simply erasing entire points of view from existence, giving users a rather distored view of the world.
      • whstl 4y ago
        Reddit is much worse than that. Reddit is a shrine to consumerism. It's almost entirely about consuming and buying stuff. Be it expensive computers, headphones, computer games, guitar pedals, modular synths. Or maybe it's about over-consuming bad news from your favorite political bubble, or from your city, or country. But it's a website that makes almost every single community regurgitate the same jokes and memes non-stop to the point it could perhaps be replaced already by ChatGPT. "Oh but thanks to Reddit I found my dream headphones and I'm finally as happy as I was before finding /r/headphones".
• hourago 4y ago
  I guess that by phones it means "social media". The amount of hate poured into social media creates a false reality where many teenagers live. The so called "free speech absolutists" that are just a facade for far-right activists looking to evade responsibilities for their xenophobic and usually violent remarks have created a hostile on-line community. Any community that lets people spread lies, and hate without consequences is doomed to suffer from anxiety and lose trust in humanity. Teenagers are just the worst affected by this as they are still developing their personalities. > Another adaptation is probably to take social media less seriously. Twitter isn’t a field of combat where heroes decide the fates of nations — it’s just a silly room where people scream at each other and tell a bunch of lies. Accepting defeat is not the way. I do not want to live in a society where lies are normalized and citizens are asked to just deal with it. Fix social media or close it. To ask millions of citizens to just accept the most cynical view of the world without being affected is neither realistic nor moral.
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    I agree “free speech” is used to justify the spreading of hate but it’s completely absurd to blame teenagers feelings on what you’re describing when none of that exists on mainstream social networks and only terminally online people get deep enough to see anything resembling it anyway. It’s for more insidious, it’s just the fact of everyone portraying far more beautiful, interesting and successful lives than them and the surfacing of validation and attention to a like number. There has always been a hierarchy in kids friend groups it’s just now we literally know it down to a number and that can’t feel good. Just don’t believe that kids are as engaged with social media hate speech and misinformation as you think they are, sounds a lot more like too-online millennial problems tbh.
    • seba_dos1 4y ago
      > none of that exists on mainstream social networks I may have missed the memo that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok et al aren't considered "mainstream" anymore.
    • gladiatr72 4y ago
• roca 4y ago
  I suspect AI is going to make today's teenagers feel a lot worse. How can you imagine a future for yourself when any skill you might learn might be obsolete by the time you learn it?
  • another_story 4y ago
    For the kids I teach this is a reality. Was asked this week what types of engineering jobs I thought wouldn't be automated.
    • Utkarsh_Mood 4y ago
      what was your answer?
      • another_story 4y ago
        I told them it was a difficult question to answer and that they shouldn't be wholly basing their decisions on what they see today. Job markets shift and so will their interests as they go into university. Be flexible and build up skills and they'll find something which works well for them. As an example I told them I studied biology and chemistry before moving into CS, and then after being a developer for years I went into teaching.
    • api 4y ago
      Tell them the AI is a tool because it is. Engineers of the future will use that tool to automate what are in fact the most boring parts of the process. This will allow engineers to create far more elaborate and advanced designs in less time just like CAD and simulation did. If the AI starts actually replacing the most important things engineers do then we are talking about sentient general intelligence and that will be a whole different ballgame. That wouldn’t be AI replacing people but a culture war about whether AI are people and whether it is wrong to use them like slaves. Right now what we have a large generative models, not sentient machines.
  • usrusr 4y ago
    And the bleak general environmental prospects: I believe that much of what we consider regular youth behavior rests on the baseline assumption that unless something exceptional happens, their future lives will be like their parents lives, with some hope for upwards sprinkled in for the particularly ambitious. These days, even those who aren't really aware of unsustainability will at least have some suspicion that the pessimists might not be completely wrong.
• seydor 4y ago
  It's like looking at their friends through a looking glass (literally) which i suppose does take some emotional toll and frustration on them But there's also something more grave, the lack of digital skills that dumbed-down phones cannot teach. Post-millenials have just not experienced complex, hierarchical computer interfaces and it shows when they are required to use something that is complex or when they use old software. It isnt what the future was supposed to be
• epups 4y ago
  I think we should talk more specifically than "phones" or "the Internet". For example, the rise of "phones" from 2012 onwards coincided with the dominance of social media. I know this sounds pedantic but the author lists several studies pointing to social media impact, and still decided to go with that title and a big picture of Steve Jobs. If we forbid smartphones tomorrow and kept the rest of the Internet the same, I doubt anything would be much different at all.
  • tgv 4y ago
    Phones (and tablets) facilitate access much more than e.g. laptops and desktops. The thing buzzes or vibrates in your pocket, you grab it and look at it. It's immediate, it interrupts everything.
    • epups 4y ago
      And what does it interrupt you with? Social media notifications. It's true that phones might be a better vector for it than most, but it's important to have clarity if we want to change anything. The article presents zero evidence for the damage phones cause without citing social media.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    I could not disagree more. Before smartphones, one would "surf the web" for an hour or so at night, and physically sit down at a PC. That's a radically different experience compared to the 24/7 always-on information overload and forever temptation of the smartphone. The very article points this out: there was a time where the internet complemented physical life, in good ways even. Second, smartphone engagement is shallow. On a PC one tends to read more, write more extensively, because it's easy to do so.
• tcmb 4y ago
  The article erroneously links to a local file for a publication by Jean Twenge, which is most likely this one: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1176/appi.prcp.20190015 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1176/appi.prcp.2...
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  >rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around them Got a few tips for this, first obviously if you’re meeting with people never do it yourself, one person doing it always causes chain reactions. If you’re meeting with one person and they start doing it never use it as an excuse to check your own phone just sit there in silence waiting for them if they’re distracted by it. This works surprisingly well and it’s funny how often people apologize, when if you check your own phone it’s always considered fine you don’t get the apology. If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name and someone reaches for their phone to google because of the compulsion and just desire to stare into their phone is getting too much, just say “it’s not important” and move on or actually I’m going to start just lying I mean it doesn’t really matter we gain nothing from having the exact answer and actually sometimes the conversation is better and the answer comes to you if you don’t check. This one bugs me a lot because like all you get is someone messing around on their phone and then announcing “it was blah blah” then everyone going “oh ok” like the act of checking the phone added nothing to the conversation, we can talk around ideas without knowing exactly who or when what happened. It just made that person addicted to their phone get their fix.
  • brainzap 4y ago
    shame is a powerful emotion that can even break some addiction
    • hn92726819 4y ago
      I don't think so. You should check out Brenee Brown's research/books on shame. Her claim is that guilt can be a useful emotion, but shame is pretty ineffective at everything. I tend to agree with the take and I think it's useful to differentiate between the two. > "Guilt is cognitive dissonance. Guilt says, I've done something or failed to do something that is aligned with my values. And it feels awful. I need to make amends, make a change and hold myself accountable. I need to fix it." > Shame, however, is a lot more damaging according to Brown, as it says "you are a bad person", and as a social species, "shame is death". From: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/brene-brown-ted-talk-emotions-shame-guilt-misconceptions-covid19/100669362 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-02/brene-brown-ted-talk-...
• Tade0 4y ago
  > In any case, the data clearly shows that isolation is increasing. Teens had been getting gradually more isolated through the decades — perhaps as a result of larger houses and better entertainment options at home. Or just the fact that according to surveys, Americans are, ahem, split on whether 12-year-old should, by law, be required to have supervision. I don't have specific statistics on teenage suicide in the EU, but the general rate has been falling over the same period despite roughly the same level of exposure to phones and social media.
  • mattmanser 4y ago
    Here's some figures, the UK stats, nothing like the US ones (graph is half way down): https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/mental-health/suicide/ https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/mental-healt...
    • thom 4y ago
      Self harm figures are claiming though, especially for girls. Notably, more than half of US suicides (even in adolescents) are by firearms: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797204 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
      • Jensson 4y ago
        But why would US suicides be climbing? It isn't like firearms are more accessible today in USA than they used to be.
        • thom 4y ago
          I’m just commenting on the relative trends in the US and UK. I suspect the trend of ‘unhappiness’ is probably similar, but suicide is slightly less of a signifier in the UK compared to self harm.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      Note that referrals to the suicide hotline are escalating enormously though. This might just be a working health care system at work.
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  > Eric Levitz points out that life in the U.S. is much better, in terms of material standards, than it used to be back in the days when teen suicide rates were much lower. In fact, if anything, wealth seems to make teens less happy; This point was followed about liberal politics, before diving into why it was the phone. Couldn't there be more of an effort to find what teens care about beyond money and politics ? I'd also give an alternative take: the state of society is horrible and teens care about the world they'll be living in. Sure phones make these issues more apparent, info flows faster, further. School shootings don't stay local news. Olympics Committee corruption is not burtied in the 20h news. Instagram pushes our esthetics stronger than previous media. Then can't the issue be that we're horrible and it's way more exposed than before ? The conclusion could have been to fix the world one step at a time, instead of going for the "close your eyes, shut your ears, hold your nose and you won't be bothered by the place you stand."
  • cnity 4y ago
    I hear you, but the solution to a flawed world isn't to push a negatively biased narrative (because let's admit it) down teen's throats until they are committing suicide. The article does go into this and doesn't assert what you say it does. In fact it suggests cultivating a sense of "optimistic determination" in response to the challenges we face in the world, which is clearly not the vibe one gets when doomscrolling.
    • jpgvm 4y ago
      Probably because the actions of those that have any power to change anything aren't exactly "optimistically determined". We have some of the most powerful men in the world attempting to start either another Cold War or at worst WW3. Existential challenges facing humanity aren't given the time of day compared to "hurrr durrr spy balloon!1!". Mass shootings go by and all anyone sees is some variation of "thoughts and prayers" yet nothing changes. When the people with the power show no willingness to improve a world which is on a downhill slope from the perspective of many young people I am not surprised that doomscrolling merely reflects reality back at you. Optimism needs to start with leaders that have the power to actually change things.
• poulpy123 4y ago
  > One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz, is that between climate change, inequality, precarity, and Covid, the world is just a much worse place than it was in 2011. But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago: Sorry but no. I was there ten years ago and climate change was much less clear for the average person than now. In my country the inequalities and precarity were also less worse (I don't know for the US though) I'm not downplaying social media and phones, they have a big responsability too
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    If it’s climate change then wouldn’t we see teens raised in families who don’t believe in it having happier lives and less suicidal tendencies. I mean we were taught extensively about climate change 30 years ago when I was in school, I don’t really thing the urgency has changed that much, if anything it feels less doomsday than some of the things we were told in school back then. Don’t recall anyone being that dramatic about it either beyond making sure to recycle.
    • _cenw 4y ago
      Climate change has become mundane. Eventually the shock wears off and resignation sets in, especially because seemingly nobody is doing anything about it that is sufficient to move the needle. Or even stop it from going the wrong direction fast. May I recommend http://readdesert.org/ http://readdesert.org/
    • burnished 4y ago
      I imagine its hard to internalize that sort of denial when you grow up with everyone talking about the weather changing noticeably over the last decade or two
  • joenot443 4y ago
    When I watched Inconvenient Truth almost 20 years ago, I left with the impression that Florida would be under water by now unless we made massive corrections in path. I’m now under the impression that while much of the science we knew back then still holds, some of it was exaggerated, and the lived effects hasn’t been as drastic as we were being told. Perhaps the average person, whomever you’re thinking of, is more aware, but personally I’ve seen a transition from sky is falling hysteria (underwater Florida) to real pragmatism and nuance in our predictions and models. Seems like the author got it right.
• cousin_it 4y ago
  I never had a smartphone. My social life did get worse when everyone around started getting smartphones. You could say just make friends with other people who dislike smartphones, but it's tricky when most people I come in random contact with (at work, in other environments) use smartphones.
  • sieste 4y ago
    There is probably a meetup group for people who don't have phones ... oh, wait, nevermind.
  • whstl 4y ago
    I think it's much more than smartphones. It's also the Netflixes, Prime Videos, Twitches, and Steams of the world. Also Youtube and Reddit. I know plenty of people who pride on not having smartphone but barely come out of the house due to streaming or games. Also Amazon, and Uber Eats, and whatever that grocery store app who fired half their staff lately is called. Smartphones are just the visible tip of the iceberg. People have no incentive to leave their house anymore. All their entertainment is inside. Hanging out barely exists for some people, even for some teenagers. We have WFH so we don't have to commute but I bet a lot is just gonna turn off one screen and turn another. I don't know the cause. Everyone says they're perpetually tired. Perhaps that's it.
    • DeathArrow 4y ago
      I agree 100%. It's not about the phones, it's that technology makes everything seem effortless and many people want now instant gratification, if not, they are unhappy. So the answer to this situation is to start being able to control yourself, let the game console, the phone the smart TV and everything else, go outside, take a walk, see what's new in town, meet with friends, go for a dinner at an restaurant, read a book, spend some time in nature. Do some of the boring things people did before smartphones, the Internet and gaming consoles. From time to time.
      • whstl 4y ago
        Yep. More boredom is the answer. Bored teens in the past created punk. Today teens are too busy to even play all the games in their Steam library. Phones aren't even the problem if you use them well. The problem is the apps that try to make you "engaged".
• Utkarsh_Mood 4y ago
  Definitely agree with this article, Im a teenager(17M) who doesn't keep a smartphone(shocker, I know) and the frequency with which my friends bring its usage into conversation is definitely frustrating and awkward at times. A lot of people basically now gauge the worth of others by the followers they have and it’s ridiculous. Then there’s also the hate accounts being made to target other individuals on Instagram and the like. Social media really has made people more shallow in my opinion and reduced the chance of actually having meaningful conversations with friends.
  • profstasiak 4y ago
    can you share what made you drop the smartphone? I wish my kids were like you and would like to push them in this direction
    • rubidium 4y ago
      It’s your job. You don’t “push” your kids. You instruct them, set expectations, and enforce the expected behavior. General advice for kids and phones: - no phones before 12 yr old - shared phones between 12-16 (with other siblings or the “house” cell phone that also can be used by parents) - own phone once 16 to acclimate them to healthy use while under your roof. - a phone box for everyone in the household that gets used between 6-10pm every day (eg phone lives in the box, can still be checked if rings but then goes back in box not pocket) - punishments that involve loss of phone privileges. This should follow the “x7 rule” where the punishment is much more severe than the disobedience (eg don’t listen to parent, 3 days without phone) - model good behavior yourself. No phone out when your kids are around.
      • Utkarsh_Mood 4y ago
        >shared phones between 12-16 (with other siblings or the “house” cell phone that also can be used by parents) lol good luck trying to enforce that when almost every 12 year old kid has their own smartphone today. 'Your' kid will most certainly feel left-out,different and noticed and will be commented on by their friends. > model good behavior yourself. No phone out when your kids are around. Yeah I dont think this is a really effective way to go about this, sure I get your point, but parents(or adults in general), have way more responsibilities and pressing matters to attend to. Not saying thats always the case, but its an apples to oranges comparison here.
• api 4y ago
  It’s not just phones. It’s social media combined with phones. Social media is toxic but when it’s confined to a browser on a computer your use is somewhat limited. Making it so portable allows people to always be addicted. The worst part of social media with phones is notifications. The social app literally vibrates in your pocket and demands your attention, taking it away from anyone you are with. A PC never did that. I have no social apps on my phone and turn off most notifications. I do browse some things like this site but when I put it away it is away and doesn’t pester me.
  • naijaboiler 4y ago
    I agree. I was surprised at all the people blaming all other things. the answer is smart phones + social media. Worst thing that ever happened to teenagers mental health. You should look at teen sex & teen pregnancy rates. It was on the decline before and just plummeted after 2010. Smartphones have killed physical interaction, and then social media adds all sorts of negative pyschology on top of that. God help us. One day, we will look back and see this smartphone/social media era as one giant negative societal experiment that should never be repeated.
• profstasiak 4y ago
  gentle reminder that browsing comments on HN makes you more isolated and less happy
• Barrin92 4y ago
  >Eric Levitz points out that life in the U.S. is much better, in terms of material standards, than it used to be back in the days when teen suicide rates were much lower. In fact, if anything, wealth seems to make teens less happy; a new paper by Rudolf & Bethmann finds that although rich countries tend to have happier adults, their adolescents tend to have lower life satisfaction. Noah Smith given his political persuasion dismisses the most obvious common thread, one that Robert Sapolsky has written about for decades. While absolute wealth has increased so has inequality, and there is strong empirical evidence that links relative inequality to mental and biological harm.[1] The relationship to social media and smartphones seems intuitive. They're an amplifier and visualizer of inequality. Social media gives influencers, celebrities a gigantic platform to broadcast their unreachable lifestyles. and being a socialite/influencer is now often listed as the, or one of the, most popular 'professions' among teens. Even ordinary users constantly idealize their own appearance and circumstances. It almost takes magical thinking to arrive at the conclusion that phones and the applications they enable have some mystical causal powers rather than accepting the most straightforward explanation. They're simply very accurate mirrors of the ever-increasing competitive and unequal social system which induces real, physiological stress in our populations. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-inflicts-real-biological-harm/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq...
  • orangecat 4y ago
    While absolute wealth has increased so has inequality, and there is strong empirical evidence that links relative inequality to mental and biological harm. The mental health of girls has worsened much more than that of boys in the last decade. Which of those groups is more likely to be following Andrew Tate and his Lambos, and which is more likely to be following genetic-lottery-winning "fitness influencers"? Both of those are "inequality" in some form, but raising taxes on the rich isn't going to do anything about the latter.
• causality0 4y ago
  The smartphone was invented in 2007 Wrong. He's off by a full decade, or even more than a decade if you count the IBM Simon.
  • api 4y ago
    Teens didn’t use those so they’re not relevant to the topic.
    • jFriedensreich 4y ago
      read the part. they author claims that is when they were invented, and even mentions it was not used widely before 2010 so criticism is 100% valid
  • jFriedensreich 4y ago
    i read this so much, every time i die inside.
• margorczynski 4y ago
  Don't want to be a Ted Kaczynski but a lot of the tech progress we've made in the last decades was/is actually detrimental to human happiness. We just ask ourselves "can we" instead of "should we" and the first to pay the price for that hubris are the children.
  • Beaver117 4y ago
    I mean we collectively decided in 2020 to trade young people's livelyhoods for old peoples lives
    • lapcat 4y ago
      Young people have parents and grandparents. Pitting age groups against each other is mistaken, short-sighted, and self-destructive. We're all in this together. This isn't Logan's Run. It would be psychopathic for young people to not care about the fate of their elders. Also, they're going to become elders themselves someday.
      • machinawhite 4y ago
        "We're all in it together" means nothing when you get shafted the most but ok
        • lapcat 4y ago
          Who do you think got shafted the most, younger people schooling from home for a couple years, or older people literally dying?
          • machinawhite 4y ago
            I thought we're talking about young people, not --toddlers-- children, for Christ's sake
            • lapcat 4y ago
• tgv 4y ago
  > In fact, our best move may simply be to wait for society to adapt. In the past, humans have shown a remarkable ability to change ... But not so much with things that fuck with our minds. Religion is a phenomenon that changes our views fundamentally, and I can't say we have overcome its influence, despite it being around for over 5000 years.
  • MrGilbert 4y ago
    So Jesus was, in fact, one of the first Influencers around?
    • Temporary_31337 4y ago
      yes, except all the other religions, priests, oracles, pharaohs before him. And his religion was based on on an interpretation of Judaism which was a thousand years old religion at a time, Other than that you're spot on ;)
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    > But not so much with things that fuck with our minds. Religion is a phenomenon that changes our views fundamentally, and I can't say we have overcome its influence, despite it being around for over 5000 years. Honestly, the change is the lack of religion in modern society. Maybe we'll adapt, maybe we won't. As a personal aside, Ireland de-catholicised really significantly during my lifetime, and while I'm super happy about lots of that, the loss of community in many places is quite real.
    • tgv 4y ago
      Lack of religion is a change, but I mentioned religion as something that influences our thoughts, attitudes and behavior, and which all over the world has lead to conflict, e.g. The Struggles. In that sense, we have not been able to deal with that particular phenomenon, and, as you say, the only way seems to be to get rid of it. Quite the analogy for social media.
      • 4y ago
• techstrategist 4y ago
  My recent anecdote. Last month my phone broke: the touch screen would stop responding, but I could still connect a Bluetooth keyboard and headphones. After maybe 5 hard resets in a row, the screen would work again for a few minutes or hours. After a few days, my head was clearer. I was sleeping better. My relationship felt better than ever, because we wouldn’t both lay next to each other on our phones before sleeping. My time with my kids was more focused, and I was more patient and fun. In week 2, I commented to my wife that I don’t know what changed, but I felt better than ever. At the time I attributed it to a new therapy lamp. After a few weeks, I finally acknowledged that due to my responsibilities I do need a working phone 100% of the time and I replaced it with a newer, modestly fancier one. In the month since, nothing else has changed: same therapy light (and now longer daylight hours); no dietary or outside well-being changes or adverse events. But that positivity isn’t there anymore. I don’t think I fully acknowledged that until this moment. And I’m still not sure what do do about it.
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    There are apps that change a smartphone screen to be greyscale only. Probably not as good as not having one but it might reduce the addictive quality substantially, worth a try in any case
    • techstrategist 4y ago
      That’s a great idea. I tried a lot of similar techniques years ago without much success, but I should try again since I’ve been diagnosed and treated for ADHD since then.
    • mtklein 4y ago
      If you're an Apple user, it's built-in, and I've found it ergonomic to assign its toggle to a triple-tap on your phone's back and/or laptop power button. Those triple-taps are effortlessly quick and rarely if ever misfire, making it totally reasonable to stay in greyscale by default and reengage color selectively when you're looking at something that merits it (film, family, friends, a Wordle scorecard...)
• ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
  The liberal/conservative gap is interesting. How much of that is due to religious or spiritual practice? What do we find deep meaning in now? For so many who are drawn to movements like effective altriusm, might that meaning come from a focus on challenges the world is facing. Does that focus dwell too much on the negative?
  • Falkon1313 4y ago
    How much of that is due to conservatives generally lagging behind progressives simply by nature of being conservative? Especially rural conservatives vs urban progressives, when it comes to tech? (And presence/lack of good internet access.) How much due to the fact that liberals tend to try to care for society and the world as a whole, and are affected by all the bad news, while conservatives tend to care for their own in-group, especially locally, and aren't affected as much by things that affect others or happen elsewhere (until or unless politicians/media try to rile them up about it specifically)?
    • ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
      That could be a part of it, but groups are usually too complex to reduce to a single dimension. As an outsider, I often browse NYT and Fox News and am struck by how utterly different front page coverage is. I don't mean the tone of coverage, just the articles and categories that make it to the front page, which either reflect an editorial bias and/or what's getting eyeballs.
      • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        CNN v Fox News is probably a fairer comparison. NYT is a newspaper after all.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  It's probably the phones when you zoom into the last few years. But it goes back even further. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest The core idea is that something becomes so addicting that you lose the ability to do anything else. Concrete example: A few years ago I decided I had enough technology usage and started to taper off and remove many devices from my living spaces. As I did this, I regained the ability to do more things. Some of those things involved writing a couple books(one on this topic specifically). Some of those things got me promoted at work. Some of those things had me present in my kids activities. Some of those things had me building a community around a new sport I've never played -- basketball.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    100% true. People will always find an addiction if they don't watch themselves. TV, social networks, gaming, it doesn't matter. They answer is to be able to control yourself, and be moderate, no matter what the temptation is.
    • jeremyjh 4y ago
      It is true but the difference also does matter; phones are always with us, they invade social situations in a way that TV and desktop internet could never do.
    • tomtheelder 4y ago
      But isn't it possible that these things have different degrees of addictiveness and destructiveness? Drugs would be the (almost too) obvious analogy. There are many that people develop addictions or dependencies on, but it's pretty clear that there are some that are far more addictive than others, and that not all of them have the same deleterious social and physical consequences. Why wouldn't activities be the same here? It seems to me that social media might be "worse" than a lot of the others. It's perpetually available, painstakingly engineered to be as addictive as possible, and may (jury is very much out here, but there's some research to suggest this) have properties that make it damaging to the psyche above and beyond normal addiction. Just like there seem to be drugs whose abuse potential is too high to rely on self-control and moderation, maybe there are activities for which the same is true.
• boilerupnc 4y ago
  This reminds me of that promotion for the “Offline Glass” [0]. Was a funny idea with some merit to encourage folks to either drink constantly or keep their phones down (as much as possible) “You can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom. The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone” [0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/18/the-offline-glass-ensures-you-talk-not-text-at-the-bar https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/18/the-offline-glass-ensures-...
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Social media is such a weird thing. You feel envy even when you're doing pretty well. Like I would see some old school friend sharing vacation pictures on Instagram and I would somehow feel an instant pang of envy. Even though I had been on a vacation literally a month back. I concluded that I was getting absolutely nothing out of social media. The entertainment is middling at best. The connections are shallow. And the feeling of envy can be overwhelming. Deleted Instagram and Facebook. Kept WhatsApp because that has actual friends and family. Kept Twitter because shitposting on anonymous accounts is actually fun and has no impact on my state of wellbeing. Also, I don't know what TikTok is like because its banned in my country, but Facebook and Instagram (especially Instagram) seem to be the most mentally damaging of all social media apps. Maybe its because of its culture or maybe its designed to be that way, but it really, truly is awful.
  • is_true 4y ago
    I think we should focus on not feeling envy when others are doing well. I always like to think that if everyone around me is rich, no one is gonna ask me money, haha.
    • piaste 4y ago
      It's not quite envy, it's expectations. It's like being at a dinner party full of people dressed up to the nines while you're just there in a clean but unremarkable shirt and blazer. You can genuinely like everybody at the table, you'll still feel an undercurrent of discomfort. And that dinner party lasts 24/7.
• lakomen 4y ago
  It's not and never has been phones. It's the state of the "world", relationships or lack thereof. As if you've never been a teenager and forgot all about it. Teenagers are people who are trying to break off from parental and supervision in general. Find their path, get confronted with them being mortal, as a kid you have no idea what that means. Personally I had a goth phase, well at first it was Rap music, then Gothic, then Techno. Music is very important when you're a teen. In my goth phase I listened to depressing music dealing with death and injustice. I wore black clothes. One day I had enough of the self torture and Techno was the new thing which I liked very much since I was also playing games on the C64 and those had great music. When I was into Rap I did scratch a lot so later I was throwing parties and was trying to make it as a DJ and music producer. But without money and false friends, my records got stolen and trackers were the only tech for cheaply creating music on the computer back then, later with windows 95 98 and so on you had actual virtual synths. Anyhow I digress... Even as an adult the state of our world gets me down. The white is black newspeech or let's call it the Orwellian Dystopia we live in. The wars and injustices. The corruption. The disregard for life and lack of respect and knowledge and most of all tolerance and understanding for being human and not being perfect. The do or die. The fact that this world could be a paradise but the powers that be choose that it shouldn't. The American imperialism, the Chinese lunacy, the European arrogance and fakeness and the Russian imperialism. Just stop with the world domination game and selling weapons. Stop profiting from the deaths of innocents. Why can't we all be friends? 2010 I remember very well. I had a girlfriend. She cheated on me. I was heartbroken and got abandoned by everyone. 2010-2012 I spend playing an MMORPG. It was the place where I was happy once. So I returned there. But it was changed. People were hateful and aggressive. The guild I've been a part of was no more. It got destroyed by some asshole kids, who acted like they own the place. In real life people were also worse, less understanding and more hateful. 2012 I quit playing that game, I was still hurting every day. I joined Google+ and focused on my income. I learned JS and Go. AngularJS. 2014 then financial success. And that broke the pain I felt every day in my chest since she cheated. That went until 2020. Now I'm applying for social security. That is a personal low. I always fought against being dependant on anyone. I never wanted state alms. I never had debt. I'm a proud person. This isn't easy. And I hate that it has come to this. Most job ads suck. They're essentially ads for the company. They want you to be their bitch, requiring you to be responsible for the whole process. "You will be working with our Cloud infrastructure where you will write , test, deploy and monitor the application stack, improve out infrastructure and evaluate alternative technologies, and well pay you 1/4 of an American and you'll like it". Yeah and on the side I'll save the world from famine and normalize the climate, and end all wars. They don't want colleagues, they want slaves. And I have a problem with that. Contract work, only with connections, which I don't have anymore. I'm in a contractor database. I ask 75€/h or 600€/day. Others ask 100€+/h. I've done PHP for 11 years, I've seen the 2001 bubble burst. I had a web hosting service, a top 1000 site on Alexa, worked freelance for national players, fixed scripts students abandoned because they were unable to do it properly. I know my stuff but I can't get in there. Those social networks are no social at all. LinkedIn sucks ass, all they do is push their tech. You search for Go jobs, they show you .net C# jobs. Mastodon sucks too. You can't have a normal conversation. Most don't even respond and if they do most of the time they're acting aggressive or ignorant. Why are they on a social network then? Should I intensify my Java knowledge? But I hate Java. Go is the way. Should I learn more about C# and .net? Should I go back to PHP where I'd work on e-commerce boredom? Meeeeh. There's only one way out, finish my projects and hope people find them usefu, meanwhile being on social security. I feel like I'm this talent that goes to waste because no one ever discovered me because I'm not in the clique and live a hermit life, but I also dislike big city life. Can't have your cake and eat it too. Or like they say in the country my mom is from, you can't clench and fart at the same time ;) What I really want to do though is travel the world, like a digital nomad, before I die. Where are the low maintenance remote jobs?
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Doesn't matter. I would still blame the conservatives and Elon Musk for this!
• quitit 4y ago
  Anecdotally (i.e. the children around me and clients who have approached me with specific problems because they're not well versed with social media). - 1. Spending a long amount of time interacting online, obviously means that what happens online is a bigger part of their world. Reducing online time is not a small feat, the child needs alternatives not just to be subjected to boredom. - 2. Better access to information has matured a lot of the topics that children are exposed to. Young people often feel their life position is in immediate danger as they don't know how to fully interpret risks like their parents. - 3. It's much easier to see what you do and don't have in comparison to others (a problem not unique to children.) - 4. Online allows for more adversarial discourse (plenty here in HN too), a lot of people don't know how to disagree without involving some kind of personal and emotionally driven response. They feel that all ideas are somehow attached to and define oneself, and thus must be protected - even from new information. While this is tied to the development of the brain, parents here can impart skills to their children to better manage these situations. - 5. Kids have found new ways to be cruel to each other that extends beyond the playground and easily supervised spaces. - 6. Online/social media has embraced reaction/feedback systems to harvest data for algorithmically generated content and moderation. This in turn has made people accustomed to valuing their input based on how others have valued it. Unlike the past, kids can see very clearly who doesn't like them. It's also a pathway for sexual abuse as children can be coerced (i.e. groomed) into posting more and more revealing content for 'likes' - even from their peers: as they may learn to value themselves by their appearance. - 7. Kids feel even more pressure to conform and disguise themselves. Reddit has their "hivemind" for example, and presenting counter-points must be done carefully, almost PR-like manner or risk being abused by strangers. Parents need to find ways of disrupting these negative influences and reducing online time to deemphasise the role it has in childrens' lives. Games and activities are a good way of developing the child's interests in a way that can make online/social media feel small in comparison, while also helping them develop confidence and coping skills (such as dealing with disappointment, adversaries or those that disagree.) In general I notice that people who use online as a resource are mentally better than those who use it to fill boredom.
• unityByFreedom 4y ago
  See also Jonathan Haidt's "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
  • yamrzou 4y ago
    Discussed 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  It's social media, the attention economy and fucked up algos that psychologically addict people to it. Phones just made it easier to access.
• Havoc 4y ago
  > Things started getting worse around 2012 or 2013: That's easy: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=instagram https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    The chart plateaus at 2014 but we see an increase in depression continue well past that. It seems unlikely there would be an 8 year lag in effects (studies seem to find more like a mere 2 weeks!)
    • Havoc 4y ago
      Not sure I'd expect continuous good correlation throughout (esp with tiktok, fb reels etc noise). Posted the link more to highlight the start date. It can't be a coincidence that bunch of girl start getting depressed right in the year an app takes off that is famous for filter heavy distorted reality of what other's perfect lives and perfect bodies look like. Not super scientific I know but seems quite persuasive to me.
• 6_6_6 4y ago
  this article is a garden variety of corelations life is more complex and intertwined
• slifin 4y ago
  Probably also from an increase in car dependency It means kids cannot play outside or go to a friends house etc Adults don't typically suffer the same restrictions so at least have an alternative to their phones
  • arsome 4y ago
    That's certainly not a development new since 2010.
• alexb_ 4y ago
  A part of the problem is that social media is at a point where being the 1 person to drop it as a teenager could have significant worsening effects purely because you now have absolutely no way to talk with friends outside of school (because they are all on social media)
• MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Maybe the world did end in 2012
• bnralt 4y ago
  > Side note: Interestingly, teen loneliness briefly went way down from about 1996 to about 2006. That’s consistent with the idea that the old computer-based internet was a complement to in-person interaction That’s been my experience too. In the early year, I remember having long conversations with different friends every night on AIM. Even some casual acquaintances ended up being good friends because of the conversation we had. I kept up with people all over the world with personal e-mail, sometimes for years. It does seems that between 2010-14 or so, people disappeared en masse from AIM. People stopped writing back to personal e-mail. Everyone migrated to social media, even though social media wasn’t a replacement. Every thing was public, good friend and strangers being in the same bucket. Long form conversations between two people disappeared. Someone would through out something to everyone they were connected to, and you could comment or ignore it. Communication just became very public, impersonal, and shallow.
  • foobarbecue 4y ago
    Absolutely. My workplace is in the throes of a "back to the office" vs "pro-telework" battle, and it seems to me that those of us who grew up during those wonderful instant messaging / email years are the core of the pro-telework camp. We know the power of asynchronous communication. We know it can transmit deep thought. We know it can create and sustain friendships, and it can be fun! We also know that the technology is all messed up now and needs a lot of work if we're going to regain what corporations destroyed in the last decade.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    This is my experience too, but I think it possibly corresponds to the transition to mid 20s and adulthood, where a lot this contact drops off anyway (not that it should). I'd be interested to know what it was like for older adults, but my guess is that a lot of them weren't using AIM that way in the first place.
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      I'm an older adult, and my experience of that period of time echoes this. The dropoff wasn't related to age, it was an effect of that moment in time.
• superb-owl 4y ago
  If you're looking to detox, but don't want to regress all the way to a dumbphone, Unihertz has some great tiny Android phones: https://www.unihertz.com/ https://www.unihertz.com/ Everything works (Maps, Uber, etc) but the screen is so small you won't want to use it very much.
  • SamBam 4y ago
    This is very appealing to me. I'm going to assume that the camera sucks, but I guess I could get back to carrying a point and shoot. (Does a point and shoot camera exist that has the same smarts as a phone camera? Obviously a real camera with a better lens is the best, but that's bulkier. If I'm going to have a crap tiny lens, then I do think the phone's AI adds something.)
    • polar8 4y ago
      Just get a phone (iphone or android, your choice) and delete everything except camera, phone, sms. Include google maps and whatever else you want. You can even set parental restrictions and leave the code in a drawer to avoid needing to exercise self control.
• app4soft 4y ago
  > Things started getting worse around 2012 or 2013 During 2012-2013 all Symbian[0] smartphones got last updates and then was abandoned by Nokia.[1,2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian [1] https://www.phonearena.com/news/The-last-Symbian-update-FP2-was-the-last-Symbian-update_id35561 https://www.phonearena.com/news/The-last-Symbian-update-FP2-... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/13/rip-symbian/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/13/rip-symbian/
  • ravagat 4y ago
    Was looking for something along this subject. When Symbian died I thought it was really bad that development on it would die switching from open source. I think there is or will be a market for a simpler phone OS like Symbian. Surprisingly I've seen folks in the country and internationally who still use Symbian/Nokia phones although the discontinuation of 2G/3G support is removing that unfortunately.
    • app4soft 4y ago
      > I think there is or will be a market for a simpler phone OS like Symbian. As for me, Symbian is not simpler OS, instead Symbian in many cases is better than Android or iOS even now.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mydriasis 4y ago
  Yes, it's the phones. This comment section feels a little better than the last few times this obvious idea has been pointed out -- generally when folks have blamed the phones in the past, dopamine fiends have come out of the woodwork to defend their devices and blame _everything else but the phones_. This tech is _straight up bad for you_. We like to pretend like having the internet accessible at all times is strictly a marvel of human achievement. While it is indeed a marvel, it's also been contorted into a disgusting mess that's specifically designed to keep you coming back to it like an addict after a fix. An entire industry has been built around sucking you into your device. The idea that we're giving something this poisonous to children -- and further, that it's a social norm to do so -- _really_ gives me pause.
  • cribbles 4y ago
    I think the reluctance to blame phones is not just that people have a personal, dopaminergic fixation on them. There are a couple of other factors at play: 1. Thinking people, especially of the sort that frequent Hacker News, want there to be a more complex and multivariate reason behind the "big problems" like loneliness and alienation. It feels wrong to just say "phones bad." 2. Many of us grew up with emerging technologies, like video games and the internet itself, that were reflexively rejected by generations older than us for reasons that seem poorly thought out in retrospect. We pattern match on the type of blithe Luddism we grew up with, and are instinctively reluctant to say "phones bad" for fear of falling symptom to it. But I agree with you, and the thesis of this article. The "phones" argument has such obvious explanatory power for a wide range of regressive social phenomena that there needs to be overwhelmingly strong evidence for some other catalyst to drop it from consideration.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    > This tech is _straight up bad for you_. What tech? Being able to talk on the phone? Having a phone you can play on? Or is it the apps that you have on your phone and that are available to you 24/7, and are engineered so you feel the need to engage with them 24/7? Because I don't think it's useful to say "it's the phones" in that case. If it's social media, it's social media, not the device you use to access social media. I'm not addicted to my phone, I'm one of those boring people that use like 50mb of mobile internet a month, and my phone screen is off 99% of the day, so I'm not sure how accurate your assessments are.
• INTPenis 4y ago
  I have my own hypothesis. I was born in the mid 80s, just FYI in case it makes a difference to my perspective. It's information overload. And not just information overload, but the type of information people are consuming from online sources. The brain is a lot better at quickly picking up subtle information than we might give it credit for. Just scrolling through a feed you see hundreds of impressions every minute, maybe thousands. We might think we're just scrolling and we're not actually picking anything up but the brain is subtly reading all of those little messages. Not only is it hard to digest, but the type of information is often unfiltered intrusive thoughts that one wouldn't normally share IRL. Add to that the fact that you can't just be yourself these days without someone filming you, and you become a meme. We started laughing at people for being themselves and being filmed, and now we're afraid of becoming a meme ourselves. So two major factors for unhappiness in this age I believe are people censoring their real selves, or feeling ashamed of what's in their heads, and constantly being fed the opinions of thousands of strangers in a never ending stream. English isn't my first language so I'm sorry if this is misunderstood by someone, please know that I'm just freely typing here with no former education or any research to back this up. It's just a gut feeling. I just don't think the human brain was designed to cope with all this constant information. Not just news, but also psychological information about what people think or feel, all over the world. It's confusing us and distracting us from self care.
  • xbar 4y ago
    Worth a read for both its prescient accuracy and its insight on the topic of information overload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
• VLM 4y ago
  Its a pity the data is so out of date in the article. Remember, things start, but they also stop. Sounds dumb but in context its insightful. Lets take the hypothesis as true that as as smart phone use goes up 10% per year, the "Z" measure goes up 0.5. Whatever a "Z" is? Regardless, cell phone use started going up coincidentally at the same time Z started going up. Thus is astrology proven. No wait seriously the point is cell phone use can only go up to near 100% one time. So what happened to the annual 0.5 increase in "Z" after cell phone use topped out at 80% or 90% or 100% or so? Sorry, no data provided. Another interesting idea: There's a deeper level to phone or social media use. Perhaps its Facebook. I know my kids generation has pretty much abandoned FB, so if its a FB specific problem it should reflect in "Z" levels. Or online dating. Or onlyfans as a job market. Another interesting idea long the lines of astrology where coincidences prove cause and effect: Peak legacy style TV viewing hours per day was around 2010. Perhaps enormous amounts of professionally produced propaganda had a sedative effect on teens, or professionally produced propaganda in TV form is more effective than social media form.
  • timerol 4y ago
    TFA has a section called "The Burden of Proof" which is a collection of causal studies and natural experiments on the topic of smartphone use.
• iamnotsure 4y ago
  Smartphones are one of the greatest inventions of humanity. That they democratize access to information about the unfortunate state of the world is a different matter.
• chadlavi 4y ago
  People said this dumb shit about novels too. It's not the phones. It's the dystopian late stage capitalist hell world they live in. They see no good future for themselves. They know their lives will be worse than ours, which are worse than our parents' were on average in the US.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    Nice try, Taylor Lorenz.
• crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  At what point does carrying around cell and wifi jammers become a public health service? What's the safest protocol for doing this? The last thing I would want is to be involved in a car accident and prevent medical personnel from being called.
• hn8305823 4y ago
  Phones are certainly a major factor but what about kids not being allowed to play outside? Numerous studies have shown spending time in nature provides significant mental health benefits, so the extreme opposite must be pretty awful.
  • naijaboiler 4y ago
    but why go play outside, when you can find ways to entertain yourself by yourself with your phone
• eru 4y ago
  > One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz, is that between climate change, inequality, precarity, and Covid, the world is just a much worse place than it was in 2011. But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago: [...] Eh, what people worry about vs how bad things actually are is only weakly correlated.
• pohl 4y ago
  But as I pointed out in a post last week, most of these things (except for Covid, obviously) were looking worse a decade ago No, they weren't, because a decade ago there was still hope that democratic process could lead to sensible public policy. Now it's not even clear that we can avoid authoritarian capture.
• NoGravitas 4y ago
  Eh, the phones don't help, and surely contribute to the problem, but fact is, young people are growing up in a cyberpunk dystopia with No Future but the Jackpot. Anxiety and depression are perfectly normal reactions to that. Trying to be a Pinker Thinker and claiming that everything is rosy is just sticking your head in the sand because you personally benefit from the status quo.
  • swalling 4y ago
    I would pay money to see a video of Pinker forced to make his “everything is better than you think” argument to a room full of teenagers. No one growing up today cares if they're better off on average than 100 years ago when they're anxious and depressed.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  This rings so true to me. I'm in my late 40s, so sometimes I think this is just a consequence of my age -- everyone at this age, for a thousand years, has started thinking things were better when they were kids (get off my lawn!), and the cause is technological changes. But frequently my much younger acquaintances will agree with me... on the other handn they didn't actually experience it, maybe they just think that's what they're supposed to say. I still suspect I'm right, and all of this OP matches my thoughts/observations. Especially that it's about social isolation -- and that the technology of connection in our pockets, despite everything 1990s techno-utopian Mondo 2000 me would have thought -- has led to drastically increased social isolation. Covid hasn't helped. I really believe that if we didn't have the internet, we coudln't possibly have isolated as much as we did -- as much as we, on the whole still are, with social changes that seem permanent -- in response to covid -- no matter the dangers. (They couldn't possibly have isolated to the level we did in response to the early 20th c flu epidemic, can they?) The internet is what made it possible to have that level of isolation. Or to seem possible. In fact, it is disastrous for us personally and socially and continues to be -- what seemed possible is not in fact possible as a successful way to live and have a society.
  • naijaboiler 4y ago
    It's the irony of modern world, we are more connected than ever before, and we are more isolated than than ever before. The same tools that connect us, isolates us.
• fleddr 4y ago
  We're biological creatures evolved to be outside, to interact with the physical world and real people. It's easily replicable. Go out for some more walks, plan more visits with friends, do some wood craft, gardening or whatever else physical. Your mood will instantly improve, reliably. Because this is your natural state. At the same time, we also have the built-in tendency to optimize for convenience. That too is perfectly natural. Hence we fully embrace all technology but forget about the cost: drifting ever further away from our very being. We're our own enemy. A common example here on HN would be the excitement regarding working from home. I get it, I love it too. But let's not dismiss that this further tilts things into a flat, isolated, touchless society. You want it, but it's still really bad for you. Further, as conscious creatures we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age. We process more of it in a day than somebody did in an entire lifetime 2 centuries ago. Likewise we're not designed for the current speed of change. And finally, we're social creatures but not designed for it at a scale of millions or billions of people. We cannot empathize with the culture, politics and differences of that scale.
  • cafard 4y ago
    If go out for walks in my neighborhood, I interact with plenty of real people. I am on a first-name basis with persons living five blocks away, and know the names of dogs belonging to families I haven't met. Working from home for a year and some months increased the number of walks considerably. If I go out for walks from work, admittedly I see a greater variety of people. But my interactions with them are limited.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    I'm with you 100% until the last paragraph. We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work out for us personally or as societies. But I see no reason we can't handle society at a scale of millions or billions of people. It, after all, always is experienced as less than that, even people who live in NYC or Mexico City have regular interactions with a smaller group of 100-200 people at most, even if incidental daily interactions with more people than most of us. But those incidental daily interactions with a huge number of people -- I am pretty sure are actually positive. To the extent that I'd predict that even in the present society with social interaction limited by the social forces we're talking about -- someone living in manhattan who, on the average can't help but interact incidentally with a huge number of people daily (on average, there are exceptions, going up with wealth!) -- is likely on average to be happier, due to those interactions, than someone in a suburb working remotely who has one to two incidental interactions... a week? I think those incidental interactions are in fact key to happiness, the more the better, and there is no problem if due to living in some of the densest places on the planet, they are with a huge number of diverse people. Also I think people seriously under-estimate the extent to which humans have lived in "urban" societies for many thousands of years. Granted, the scale of "urban" was smaller than it is now (a city of 20K people was enormous 500 years ago), but we have always been extremely social creatures, always in fact, in general on aggregate, looking to maximize our number of relationships and interactions. (See eg _Dawn of Everything_). (I also think people way over-estimate the universal cultural homogeniety of "ancient" and "pre-historical" civilizations. Things were not as we assume).
• bannedbybros 4y ago
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• klooney 4y ago
  > TV was despised by whole generations of educated Americans — an “idiot box” that would shorten your attention span and rot your brain. The whole first or second chapter of Bowling Alone is about network effects causing downward spirals in socialization, with TV as the primary substitute. It's basically the same story as Haidt's. They were probably right.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Why were depression rates so low in the 90s/00s then? It doesn't really add up
    • klooney 4y ago
      TV rots your brain and helped break apart the social fabric, but it makes you happy. Cheers, Friends, The Office- lots of shows basically performed the function of companionship.
• XorNot 4y ago
  I find it very hard to believe "it's the phones", when 1 in every 8 teen girls reports being a victim of rape.[1] > Of note: 18% of teen girls said they had experienced some form of sexual violence in the past year, compared to only 5% of teen boys. > The rate of teen girls who have experienced sexual violence has increased by 20% since 2017, when the CDC first started tracking the measure, per ABC News. "The percentage of male students who experienced sexual violence by anyone did not change," the report stated. Nearly 15% of teen girls said they had ever been forced to have sex, a 27% jump from 2019 and the first increase since the CDC began tracking the metric, per the Washington Post. 4% of teen boys said they had ever been forced to have sex, with no increase reported. [1] https://www.axios.com/2023/02/13/teen-girls-sadness-violence-cdc-report https://www.axios.com/2023/02/13/teen-girls-sadness-violence...
  • fleddr 4y ago
    You're contradicting the entire point of the article. You mention increases as of 2017 and 2019 whilst the phone narrative aligns with 2012 and beyond. Mental health fell of a cliff since 2012 and seems to keep degrading ever since. One other study showed that even COVID had a limited effect, it was just a continuation of a trajectory happening since 2012.
    • XorNot 4y ago
      Yes I am, because the article opens with it's conclusion and then steadfastly ignores data regarding serious crimes being perpetrated about the age group it claims to be worried about. Continuing the one true sociological trend: nobody believes women when they say they've been assaulted.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  I don't know if my work is impacting how I'm viewing my procrastination from my work, but I view this the same way that I view basically everything I see at my job: "You don't have enough data to say that". Graph of depression scores between 2000-2018. Ok, that tells us...er... not much! And then to take that really limited bit of data and just pick a random technology that doesn't really line up with the timeline at all.... errr? Social media was at like 50% penetration in 2010, we know young people were early adopters, and yet the depression numbers don't break out of their normal range 2013. This is taking very little data and lining it up to things that happened in the world that sort of line up but not really. It couldn't be a better example of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The reason I'm really pushing hard on the "It's not much data" side, is because here's a question - Is teen depression higher than normal? Or was it lower than normal during the early 2000s - a period of high economic growth, US cultural hegemony and monoculture? Who knows! It seems kind of absurd that we should argue one creaky theory should be our prior. If you don't really have enough data to strongly say something is true, your prior should be to say "We don't know". It doesn't help your reasoning to assume one theory at all, and points us in one direction where the answer maybe something completely different. For example - what if it's actually the case that this is a function of social acceptability. In the past we saw a situation where it was socially unacceptable to be gay (and legally unacceptable worth noting), when that was the case you could survey people and find there were very few gay people. When it became more acceptable, suddenly the surveys showed far more gay people. There genuinely were people at the time this happened that were making the claim this was a conspiracy making people gay. Well, what if the destigmatization of mental health has had a similar effect? There were always depressed teens, but they never "came out" as it were. Then this whole discussion about phones is just... a weird distraction?
• greenhearth 4y ago
  "News organizations and social media shouters have an incentive to show you bad news, because that’s what gets them attention and clout and/or money." Yeah, maybe there's a lot of this stuff, e.g. Vice is the major misery fetish peddler. But can't the journalists be reporting the bad news because it's actually news and needs to be reported?
• smm11 4y ago
  I honestly think that if Steve Jobs were still around this phone/social media dynamic would have turned out differently.
• pksebben 4y ago
  > Industrial society itself was feared and hated for centuries by people who thought it would separate us from the land and commodify our existences. And yet very few of those panics were borne out in the long term this was not a great point to end that list with. We are commodified to the gills.
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  Anything complicated when it comes to society usually has more than 1 direct or indirect cause. I'm sure phones (and IMO the way online dating works) contribute heavily to some young peoples unhappiness, but there's many other potential reasons why young people might be hopeless for the future. And it might not necessarily be the phones in and of themselves, but something within social media itself.
• lampshades 4y ago
  I know a complain about WFH frequently (maybe you’ve seen me post about it) but I’m pretty sure it’s not doing anything to help our isolation situation.
• finfrastrcuture 4y ago
  Anecdotal, but I've noticed that the seniors in my life are often just as addicted - if not more so - than the 'youths'. Seniors not only have just as much free time as teenagers, but also nobody to tell them no / stop it! I would love to see an article of the same caliber exploring if the data suggests a link between the rise of phones and senior depression rates.
• JPKab 4y ago
  I'm a subscriber of Noah's, really like his writing, and think this is a pretty good take. However, he doesn't have kids, and probably doesn't get a full dose of some of the nuance as to some further observations that would give his claims higher confidence. He misses the tipping point: Kids on phones and highly addictive, social/collaborative video games (think Fortnite) means less kids in any given OUTSIDE space hanging out. The less kids hanging out in those spaces, the less likely a kid encounters peers their age in a given outdoor/social space. The less likely they encounter peers in those spaces, the less likely they'll even TRY to go to those spaces. It's a tipping point that executes the network effects of growth in reverse. And it's entirely a cascade caused by lazy, overly permissive parents who use screens as babysitters and rationalize it away with either learned helplessness ("I'm too old to understand this tech, how can i regulate it") or the utter BS of "they're learning technology for a future career", as if scrolling tiktok for 7 hours a day teaches kids to code. I have a 16 year old son. It's hard to emphasize how little they socialize in person nowadays. If a kid spends the night, he'll complain about us having only one Xbox and TV, and how he can't play Fortnite at the same time as the other kid. They PREFER to be in their room at home, playing the same game while talking to my son over a headset.
  • xthrown1 4y ago
    I wonder if these people ever talked to friends on the actual telephone. I remember spending hours in the 90s talking to friends there because I was so bored of the TV. Then in the 00s with voip we could talk to more than one person at a time. Reading this I wonder if this is some sort of baby like forgetting or if I was truly so out there.
  • MikeTheRocker 4y ago
    Your anecdote about your son's behavior is the kind of insight that convinces me that parents have a window into the future the rest of us don't. I'm relatively young (mid 20's), but even still it's clear to me the even younger generations are developing fundamentally different ways of operating in the world than I did. I think phenomena like the reverse network effect resulting in isolating young people are terrifying. I don't know what will be the ripple effects, but I'm inclined to think they won't be good. I also don't know what to do about it, but I get the feeling this is going to become a huge problem modern society hasn't paid enough mind.
• jeffwask 4y ago
  Sure, it's the phones... not the non-stop barrage of psychological manipulation from the ad driven capitalist hellscape we have created that poison their underdeveloped minds in everything they interact with from websites to games to TV to movies. Never mind they live in a constant state of alertness looking for which classmates going to waltz into school one day and start shooting. I'm sure though if they put the phone down and touch grass for 15 minutes that will all go away.
  • jeffwask 4y ago
    To me this is a mirror to the problems, I have seen with my generations parents who grew up on "Fairness Doctrine" media. They were used to fair and balanced Walter Kronkite who by law was required to present untainted news. Many never adapted to news as infotainment and the new requirements around seeking multiple sources and such to understand the actual facts. Our children have similarly been presented a world where the laws protecting children from aggressive ads have been eroded, the psychology of ads has been ramped up, and ads have been hidden and added to products they never existed in. As an example, I recently saw a TikTok where a young woman was walking people through her 12 year old sister's skin care and makeup routines. She had hundreds of products just an obscene amount of chemicals and ungents. These products and the need for them is often not pushed through typical ads but testimonials from creators and influencers who may or may not indicate they are being paid to push these products. Even in the escapism of games, teens are bombarded with in game ads, micro transactions, content partnerships, etc. It used to be fire up Mario Bros and play. It's now fire up Fortnight and here's the store, did you buy a battle pass, how about some skins, you better not be using default skins because then you aren't cool. Buy more, pay more, be the cool kid in the latest skin. Entire teams paid to drive monetization by exploiting the psychology of children and adolescents. It's non-stop and how does a 12 year old have the critical eye to identify these manipulations when most of their parents don't even understand the worlds and communities they live in. A phone is just a screen and we have dozens of screens in our homes and every one blasts aggressive psychological manipulation at this vulnerable population who used to be protected.
• DFHippie 4y ago
  The people who point to the current state of material plenty and say it therefore can't be the state of the world are mistaken. If you anticipate loss, you will be unhappy. It doesn't matter how rich and comfortable you are. Anxiety is about anticipated threat. And if you believe you are powerless to counter an anticipated threat anxiety becomes despair. As to whether it is phones, maybe. I know I have three college age kids who are all varying degrees of unhappy, aside from the one who just took his own life. The one who died had almost no presence on social media at any time in his life. The happier of the remaining two spends the most time on her phone and social media. There must be some underlying cause or suite of causes. I know the phone doesn't fit in their cases. The ever more evident horribleness of much of humanity has clearly weighed on all three. I don't think it was the principle factor in the death of my son. And I know the "but they're rich, healthy, and safe!" argument doesn't do all the work it's supposed to do.
• anonymoose33282 4y ago
  I think it’s also how we interact with them. I remember being “chronically online” as a teenager 15 years ago without a phone, just playing MMORPGs all day and me and my friends (all internet friends the same age, didn’t meet IRL until our early 20s) didn’t have the same issues that teenagers are dealing with now. I think there’s something inherently comparative and consumerist to social media. I’ve travelled a lot, despite being under 30, and in the last couple years I really felt like a lot of it was just to earn some “achievement” after seeing other people I know traveling places. I haven’t been on any social media for over a year now, and that latent background noise of “I need to do this, go there, buy that” has faded. I’d usually consider myself pretty immune to stuff like that but social media often feels like MTV Cribs, just for every social class, and that’s maybe what’s so insidious about it.
• Clent 4y ago
  This issue isn't the device. It's how the device is being used. Most of this is explained by social media algorithms. If you are a developer on these projects, it's going to be hard but you need to accept your slice of responsibility here.
• braingenious 4y ago
  Gotta love all these articles navel-gazing about the cause of teenage depression by econ bloggers. Has anybody done a poll and asked teens what they’re sad about? It’s really quite funny to see somebody take Matt Yglesias seriously. The self-described “professional take-haver” looked at two graphs, nodded his head and wrote down “this is causation”, and he’s talking about people having progressive politics!
  • fundad 4y ago
    More people are getting care for depression.... this is terrible!
• fundad 4y ago
  If the author believe the stigma against neurodivergence wasn't that bad or had some merit, then it's easy to see their perspective that something ruined our perfect society.
• bryananderson 4y ago
  So my prior is definitely "it's the phones", and I am totally fine with being old-man-who-shakes-fist-at-cloud about what phones and social media are doing to kids (and all of us). But this article does the thing that infuriates me the most about any kind of discourse in the US, across all political tribes: Ameri-solipsism. How do youth suicide, depression, anxiety, and isolation trends in the US compare to other countries? Across countries, what's the correlation with smartphone and social media adoption? Is there a plausible causal link where we see these trends rise in each country a few years after wide adoption? If it doesn't always follow, what factors separate countries where phones seem to cause depression from those where it doesn't? How do political polarization, economic shifts, and different cultural norms correlate with these things across countries? No idea! Because a space alien reading this article would come away thinking that Earth consists of precisely one country. Use comparative data to tease out other factors at play? Ha! As if America could have anything to learn from anyone else. I expect this from jingoistic conservatives, but it's infuriatingly common even among progressives who supposedly reject nationalistic exceptionalism: dive deep into some big problem (which on its surface has nothing US-specific about it) without any curiosity whatsoever about how anyone who's not American deals with it.
• Name_Chawps 4y ago
  Could a healthy middle ground between doing nothing and banning all social media be banning social media on small mobile devices? Only allow TikTok and Instagram etc. to be installed on desktop computers, laptops, and maybe tablets? That way people can use them without being glued to them 24/7?
• deleted 4y ago
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• expazl 4y ago
  > The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness. For any explanation to be plausible it has to take into consideration that America is not the world. We don't see the same sharp rises in depression amongs teens in europe, and guess what, europe has phones too, it has social media too. The explanation has to be rooted in something that's taking into account the differences between USA and the rest of the world. One thing that comes to mind is that children likley suffer trauma when they see students murder other students or shoot their teachers, or hear news about such events. But I don't quite think the size of the problem matches the size of depression statistics, even if rampant school shootings and gun violence are a uniquely american problem.
  • justsocrateasin 4y ago
    Not true. What statistics do you have here? I've been following Jonathan Haidts substack and he researches this extensively. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... He cites multiple studies that talk about how the same trends are going on in other countries, and the same trends are occurring under similar timelines in places that receive high speed internet.
• lubesGordi 4y ago
  Anecdotally my anxiety and unhappiness started going way up around 2012/2013 because the loose social groups I was involved with were using facebook to organize, and I'm one of those people who is too literal or sarcastic or something to come off right on social media and so I had difficulty integrating. Previously, my socializing involved more face to face or calls or texts about what was going on, something I'm much better at.
• lizard_brain 4y ago
  Blaming the phones is like blaming Gutenberg for the Thirty Years War. The prime issue is a lack of intentionality and discipline around how people spend their time.
• numbers_guy 4y ago
  The "phones" aka the Internet ruined everything for me when it come to social life. It used to be, and I caught that briefly, but it used to be that if you had to do something, you had to meet up with people. Maybe we hated it at the time, but meeting up with people forces you to socialize and also keeps you grounded. And moreover it provides social opportunities. I mean, this is not just teenagers suffering from lack of opportunities to socialize.
• archarios 4y ago
  Obligatory plug for the Light Phone 2. I have had one for two years now and I love it. I still keep a smart phone around for some things but it is generally in a drawer powered down. I have had a significant improvement in my mental health since I've gotten it.
• timbit42 4y ago
  Without social media, the phones would be fine.
• ixtli 4y ago
  Im really happy that people are talking about this but the article doesn't seem to consider the fact that over this period we (americans) have also dramatically increased the quality and breadth of our conversation around mental health. so it could just be that now people are reporting things
  • zwkrt 4y ago
    Chicken and egg, I think. I am a firm believer that people don't have much better or worse mental health now over-all. But I do think that in the past mental health was something that was more intuitive and that people got more support for from their immediate social circle. Now that society is further isolated, people both have more time to ruminate about the specifics of their mental health, and the solution to having bad mental health is more frequently to talk to a therapist. Even this would not by itself cause the increased medicalization of totally normal human problems. However, therapists need to bill insurance and it is not really possible to bill insurance for general malaise. Additionally, more people are expected to be rational economic agents more of the time, and rational economic agents don't have any emotions. So people that fall outside of the narrow bounds of what is considered acceptable and exhibit behavior outside of the narrowing band of that which allows for gainful employment means that more people are categorized as having specific ailments. People that /are/ able to crush themselves into the little boxes that are required of them to not end up on the streets have their own mental health problems as spill-over. TL;DR: society optimized for money causes people to feel crazy.
    • ixtli 4y ago
      There's a lot i could say but tbh i agree with most of what you say here.
• o_nate 4y ago
  Phones may have something to do with it, but I'm surprised that nowhere in his article does Noah mention the other major change in the US social landscape over this time range: the widespread legalization of marijuana products. I realize it's not "legal" for teens but you're not living in reality if you don't think it's become much easier for teens to get ahold of potent weed and a myriad of products like weed gummies that didn't even exist before. The links between marijuana use and teen depression are well documented.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  I miss my old life. It feels like another world. Before Twitter took over the world and back when I saw people every day, and didn't think the world was conspiring to turn me into an API input and output.
• taeric 4y ago
  Oh wow. I was all prepared to agree that it is a big smoking gun; and then I got to the "smart phones were invented in 2007." I mean, not wrong? Ish. But phones were a much larger part of especially college age youth well before that. Were they as "smart" as what we have now? Of course not. But they still had tons of text and basic news capability for a long time. I think it is still a strong correlation that does need to be shown as not causal. I cannot think they "sprang from nowhere" as implied by the claim, though.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Before smart phones the only thing young people did on phones was text. It's not really comparable.
    • taeric 4y ago
      Fair. I know I was in a fairly text messaging heavy subculture. I remember ICQ took over on the computer and many of the folks that were there would jump over to texting each other. So, I have to grant that things are different.
• Workaccount2 4y ago
  Hah Just wait a few years until we get AI companions, and everyone else in your life sucks by comparison.
• jcadam 4y ago
  > One possible reason, suggested by Taylor Lorenz... Stopped reading right there.
• MBCook 4y ago
  Yep. The phones. Not the erosion of rights. Not the Supreme Court ignoring precedent and making partisan decisions. Not books being taken away from schools. Not a pandemic. Not seeing an attempt at overthrowing the government. Not the planet boiling and no one doing anything anything about it. It can’t be that they can’t find jobs that treat them decently. Or even like the job wanted them to live. Or that they can’t afford school. Or a car. Or to move out. Or to have kids. Or healthcare. Or that they likely know someone crippled by medical debt. Or the opioid crisis. Or that they’ve seen police abuse of power (in person and/or the media). That no one seems accountable for anything. Couldn’t be the fact the can’t find a counselor/psychiatrist even if they could afford it because there aren’t enough. Or there’s a war on threatening global tensions. No one is “in it together”, the pandemic proved that, so you’re on your own. Extracurriculars cost too much, so you may not even get to try. Your teachers are burnt out and leaving. Even if they aren’t and are good there is a good chance you can’t learn well thanks to disruptive students. Good luck if you’re bored because you need more challenge. Also? School bathrooms didn’t work for months because other kids kept tearing stuff off the walls as a “prank”. That’s all off the top of my head. Yeah. It’s the phones. If we took the phones away everything would be peachy and kids would be happy again. EDIT: all that and I forgot school/mass shootings and active shooter drills!
  • dools 4y ago
    A lot of the stuff you mentioned is quite recent OR doesn’t actually impact teenagers, and the really egregious politics didn’t kick off that badly until Trump got in. The graph shows a sharp rise in teen happiness starting about 2011.
  • rubidium 4y ago
    Given your comment, may I so boldly suggest you probably would be happier without your phone.
• sublinear 4y ago
  > the timing just lines up really well. The smartphone was invented in 2007, but it didn’t really become commonplace until the 2010s, exactly when teen happiness fell off a cliff Oh man so trivially incorrect. Plenty of people had smartphones before that despite the iPhone. What happened in 2010 was social media getting hit by politics and marketing. This isn't even up for debate. It's straight facts.
• disqard 4y ago
  > "it’s easier to just text a friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be less fulfilling" I think that's a typo, and should be "the latter would be more fulfilling"? Or else, I'm confused...
• low_tech_love 4y ago
  One other possible explanation is that phones are everywhere, regardless of most any other factor. Take any teenager, anywhere, in any walk of life, age, or social group, nation, etc. They very, very probably have a phone. Guess what’s also mostly everywhere, regardless of other factors? None of these are perfect explanations, obviously, but I’ve seen what phones do to my kids (even in the limited amount of time they have) and others. It’s absurd to ignore it. Sure, I can’t prove that phones are the cause, but my son goes from the sweetest kid to an anxious, angry mess as soon as he has a phone in his hands (and before you ask, yes, sometimes it’s inevitable, I live in a capitalist society that expects me to both work my ass off and to take care of my kids at the same time. Also, I don’t have the illusion that I can stop him from ever using one, so I’d better be around and teach him how to deal with it the best way possible).
• mbrochh 4y ago
  That, and the carbs. The time and attention that the phones suck up, also make everyone more likely to consume quick an easy carbs. But it's the carbs that ultimately fuck up your body and then your brain.
• moving_sofa 4y ago
  What also contributes to <18 (and the elderly) social isolation is the car-centric urban planning which denies mobility freedom to this demographics. This is even more relevant in North America Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw